Each week, we search New York City for the most exciting and thought-provoking shows, screenings, and events. See them below.

Monday, April 16–Sunday, July 29

Installation view of “Visitors to Versailles” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

1. “Visitors to Versailles (1682–1789)” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Met examines the palace of Versailles as a tourist attraction, a magnificent public court that drew visitors from across Europe, as well as the Americas, Asia, and Africa. With furniture, garments, art objects, and other artifacts, the show offers a fascinating window into how the court would have appeared to foreigners and day trippers alike from 1682 through the start of the French Revolution in 1789.

2. “Expanded Portraiture: Panel Discussion” at MoMA
Portraiture is all the rage right now, and in conjunction with the current exhibition, “Being: New Photography 2018” in the museum, MoMA has assembled a panel of experts—including Michelle Obama’s portraitist Amy Sherald—to discuss what exactly portraiture means in the age of selfies.

Location: Museum of Modern Art, 4 West 54 Street, enter through the Cullman Education and Research BuildingPrice: $15 General admission ($10 for members, $5 for students)Time: 6 p.m., reception to follow

—Caroline Goldstein

River Cafe London: Thirty Years of Recipes and the Story of a Much-Loved Restaurant and some of its hand-illustrated menus. Photo courtesy of Knopf.

4. “Rewriting Painting” at Cooper UnionThe launch of the first Philip Taaffe monograph takes place alongside a panel discussion on the state and shape of contemporary painting. Panelists include Lois Dodd, Faye Hirsch, Thomas Nozkowski, Taaffe, and John Yau. Critic Barry Schwabsky will moderate the discussion.

Location: The Great Hall at Cooper Union, 7 East 7th StreetPrice: Free with RSVPTime: 6:30–8 p.m.

Thursday, April 19–Saturday, May 12

Amanda Gutiérrez, Paradise Memories 2 (2017). Courtesy of Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York.

6. “Amanda Gutiérrez: Walking in Light” at Baxter Street at the Camera Club of New York
Walking in Lightness is an exploration of Gutiérrez’s experience as a Mexican immigrant woman living and working in New York. She uses disposable cameras to deemphasize the authority of photographic representation and presents her prints in multiple iterations, each with a different tone—showing us the simple but profound ways in which photographic processes can alter the way people are represented. Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon throughout the run of the exhibition, Gutiérrez will turn the Camera Club into a public studio, inviting viewers in to watch as she creates test prints and works on a video installation. She will also host “soundwalks” on Thursday evenings, taking guests along walking trips through Chinatown as she documents the process.

8. “Wojciech Fangor: The Early 1960s” at Heather James Fine Art New York
For its inaugural show at its New York location, Heather James Fine Art will present the first US exhibition of Polish Post-War abstract painter Wojciech Fangor in over 25 years. A selection of 11 large-scale paintings demonstrates the artist’s bold color palette and connections to the Color Field and Op Art movements.

7. “Emma Kohlmann” at Jack Hanley Gallery
Bronx-native Emma Kohlmann uses Sumi ink and watercolors that are so fluid, they almost look like stains on the canvas. Despite their amorphous shape, the figures in her vignettes engage in very human activities, and each has a distinct personality.

9. “Laurel Shear: Daydreaming in My Nightmare” at Fort Gansevoort Gallery
Shear’s large-scale abstract paintings—built to the size of a California king-size bed to be exact—are at once arresting and vibrant. Details of folds in bedsheets and other tactile materials are a recurring source of imagery in her work are reworked with often moody palettes into elaborate dreamscapes. Following an enthusiastic reception at the recent Untitled fair in San Francisco, Fort Gansevoort gallery director Adam Shopkorn brought the Bay Area artist’s work east for a debut show at the gallery where sales have been robust. Catch the show in its last week, before it closes April 21.

11. “Theo Triantafyllidis: Role Play” at Meredith Rosen Gallery
Triantafyllidis’s new show seeks to slyly disintegrate the boundaries between digital and physical reality. The gallery will include mobile flat screens looping a 3-D animation of the artist working in a virtual studio via the avatar of a hulking, World of Warcraft-esque Ork. In this alternate on-screen form, Triantafyllidis continuously struggles to create a set of art objects while musing about the questionable value of artistic labor in a world where every digital fantasy is readily available. Meanwhile, Rosen’s gallery space will include wooden sculptural versions of the digital “pieces” completed by Triantafyllidis-As-Ork, opening the door to thorny questions about everything from what constitutes “artwork” to what constitutes “real” in a world of social media, Pokémon Go, and deepfakes.

12. 2018 Village Fête at Pioneer Works
Red Hook’s Pioneer Works reliably hosts one of the art world’s most offbeat, enjoyable galas. This year’s hosts include a mix of big-name artists and celebrities, including Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, Michael Shannon, Esperanza Spalding, Mickalene Thomas, and Carol Bove. Tickets to the dinner are sold by the table but plan to hit up the afterparty, featuring performances by Spank Rock and Chances With Wolves.

13. “Carole Freeman: UNSUNG” at Jim Kempner Fine Art
Figurative painter Carole Freeman highlights 24 of unsung heroes who have fought against social injustice, discrimination, and the destruction of the environment, among other pressing issues, in a series of portraits. Her subjects include Lois Jenson, who won the country’s first sexual harassment class-action lawsuit—which later became the subject of the 2005 Charlize Theron film North Country—and Emmett Till’s uncle Mose Wright, who bravely testified against the men who murdered the 14-year-old African American boy after he was falsely accused whistling at a white woman.

Michael West’s The Passover (1974). Courtesy of the artist and her estate, and Mark Borghi Fine Art.

14. “Michael West: The Black and White Paintings” at Mark Borghi Fine Art
Born Corinne Michelle West, the abstract expressionist painter Michael West studied under the tutelage of Hans Hofmann, whose gestural marks left a big impact on her work. After befriending Arshile Gorky, West decided to take on the name Michael, so that her work could be considered on its merit, and not sidelined by the gender biases that prevailed when she began showing work in the early 1930s.